What are you doing to keep your SMBC Prestia Gold status?

[regular]

I am not a US person. I remit to my family outside Japan and also deposit USD cheques to my account free of charge (which I don’t know who else does free). So, want to maintain the gold status if possible. I already have mortgage with another bank, so I was thinking of buying their mutual fund if they have competitive offerings to also have 3 million yen in average monthly wealth management balance to fulfil the new requirement. None of my family members have any NISA, iDECO accounts opened yet but I have an account with Monex for many years where I still am a substantial loss, and so don’t look at it. However, remaining Monex balance itself may put me into Shinsei Gold status if I want to close Prestia account.

Any specific ideas if I want to invest in Prestia's mutual fund offerings?

[sutebayashi]

My understanding is you need to remit money overseas regularly, and deposit USD checks.

Certainly would be nice to keep those fees free, but say you had to pay the fees, how much would it be each year?

Also, you have some bad investment in your Monex account you care bit to think about. Say you cut your losses there, and invested in one or more diversified index funds - what sort of return might you get?

My thought is just that paying the fees to Prestia might be of less significance than leaving your bad investment lingering - indeed, buying some high-fee Prestia mutual fund may not really bring you out ahead.

I haven’t looked at Prestia funds recently to see, but a decade or more back when their bank had another name, I didn’t see their funds as being so attractive for me as a customer.

[regular]

Thank you all for sharing your experiences.

sutebayashi, thank you for bringing me out of slumber. I have had gold status for around 25 years, and have 40+ accounts registered with them where I can just remit without thinking, so this setup saves me time. I wanted to take the easy way out but now I am motivated to do some calculation, and to look elsewhere, if necessary.

I do read a lot about investing in a slim index fund here, but stock markets everywhere went up a lot...

I would worry less if I could use my Nisa (new Nisa) or iDeCo allocations to lower my taxable income without placing them in stock or bond market immediately, but don't know whether it is possible or not.

[Telebroker]

Thanks for starting this status discussion, as I am thinking about a way out since they notified us. Very assuring to read that there indeed seems no cheap way to maintain status.
Currently I am leaning to just let it laps as I only really benefitted from Prestia’s free domestic overseas transfers to non resident IBKR account with Citibank NA, Tokyo - which required filling out a paper (!) A4 transfer form…. ;( …. in 2023.

I intend to shift my main operation to the SMBC Olive account which has a very attractive (low and point prone) pricing scheme, incl. free transfers if made online/via app.
The IBKR transfers I could at least do online at JPY 800.
F/X multi currency for investments at IBKR for very slim fees and good interest rates.
I also note that SMBC has the most modern app among Japanese (mega) banks incl. a Moneytree collaboration and (some) English features.
Other overseas transfers: I use Revolut which is free up to JPY 750k/m;
NISA: Rakuten Securities with emaxis slim anyway;
Credit Card: multiple, some SMBC Visa (ANA) as well as the Olive multi function Card.
SMBC and Olive also fully support Apple/Google wallet (which Prestige doesn’t);
No mortgage
No IDeCo

With this I won’t miss much from Prestia Gold and may actually enjoy setting SMBC as CC deduction account for other cards much easier compared to exotic Prestia paperwork

Happy to hear if I overlooked something.